life and times of a young kiwi

Do you pray?

If you pray, I think it’d be good if you pray for the people of Pakistan. They’re going through some stuff right now. And by “stuff” I mean water. Lots of water.

When you see it from the air you get a sense of the scale of what’s happening.

Imagine that your home was in the middle of there. Imagine the pain of leaving it. Imagine the terror of physically trying to leave it, but of having no dry ground to walk on for miles and miles. That much water is horrifying.

I think after experiencing our own natural disaster here in Christchurch I have a renewed empathy for people who experience life-altering events like this. It’s not just the fact that your life has changed, it’s the manner of the change. A violent wrenching away of everything you knew and an unceremonious discarding of your life into a whole new existence.

In relation to the Canterbury earthquake I always feel that there are so many people much worse of than I am. I almost feel guilty. I feel crazy lucky that this happened to me now, when I’m young, when I’m not responsible for anyone else. Seeing how the quake affected the elderly in particular has been quite hard. Old people aren’t meant to have to deal with things like that. When you’re old, alone, scared of everything and physically unable to cope with the conditions of a natural disaster it must be so hard. The knowledge that your world will not recover in your liftime must be paralysingly horrific.

I hope when I’m old, I won’t have to go through that.

But this man does have to.

So maybe, if you sometimes pray, you could pray for him. And his neighbours. And the 7.5 million other people affected.

It’s a year on from the first Christchurch earthquake. What’s still so evident to us here (though it’s not really newsworthy elsewhere) is the thousands of ongoing affects on all our lives. In Pakistan the floods of 2010 and the current flooding have destroyed immense amounts of crops and livestock (= money and food for humans and non-humans). When the implications of this are considered it is really overwhelming.

So, if you pray, please pray for Pakistan.

Would you like another way to help? There are appeals.
“Appeal” is a weird word, isn’t it? Like, it’s what you do when someone’s about to kill you with an axe – pretty intense – but it’s also a word you hear all the time in relation to people wanting needing stuff. We become a bit numb to it; I guess we have to.

If you’d like to spend your money on this instead of on some new fingernails or a steak or a movie, you might like to check out the